D&D 1E What makes a D&D game have a 1E feel?

[Lanefan]

1e AD&D at low levels is fairly mundane, but once you get going in 1e with levels and have a bunch of buffer hp and magic spells and/or magic items it is fantasy superheroes like 3e+ D&D.

One could argue - and I will, just for kicks - that 1e's sweet spot is when it's kinda between those two states, i.e. ranging from about 3rd to 7th level.

For some, the sweet spot is 2nd-4th or even 1st-4th, before various game-altering spells arrive at 5th. Mundane with extras.

For others, it's 5th-8th when that first batch of game-changing spells has arrived but before the next lot show up. Fantasy heroes but still not completely over the top.

9th+ level play is almost a different game.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The biggest key to a 1E feel is that I have to be going through puberty when I play it.

 

[Lanefan]

D&D's first published module was 1e's G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief where it recommended you have nine PCs of at least ninth level each and with two or three magic items.

Interesting. I've run it for considerably lower-level groups (most recently, a large party of 11 4th-8th level characters) and they've succeeded, though not without taking some casualties* along the way.

I should note that while our PCs probably have more going for them than 1e RAW would have it, so do the Giants - I've beefed them up considerably over the rather wimpy things they are in the 1e MM.

* - one or two of which were self-inflicted; that party didn't always get along very well.

 

[Blue]

That you can succeed at a task by describing what you are doing or how you are approaching a problem without needing a die roll.

Characters are an avatar for you to explore a fantasy world more so than a full persona.

EDIT: Just realized I was replying to a necro thread. Ooops.

Agree with your whole list, I just want to expand on these for people who hadn't played them.

In current D&D, we play characters that can do fantastic things, many of which the players can't do. And the flip side is that there is an acknowledgement there are some things the players can do that the characters can't. For instance my 8 Charisma barbarian without skills will not be an effective face of the party.

But skills didn't exist in the early game. They came in as optional rules, and not even in the core books.

There's an old saying "No one ever fell off a horse before there was a Ride skill". It means that your characters were assumed competent at things that made sense, and without a mechanic like skills, there was a lot less mechanical checks.

There was no Investigate skill to find a hidden compartment in a desk. You described pulling the draws out, checking their height and length to see if there's unexplained room. You might knock on solid parts to listen if they were really hollow.

Even where there were checks, descriptions could trump it. Just you might have a 1 in 6 chance to find a secret door (more if you were an elf), but if you manipulated the torch sconce that controlled it, the door would open regardless of that check.

So there was a lot of hands on, a lot of player skills fitting in for character skills (since there were no character skills) fuzzing that line between player and character.

Think of the simplest way to do Riddles in 5e - just rely on player knowledge and ingenuity to figure them out. Now apply that to 85% of things that would be skill checks in modern play, because there was no mechanics to say how good the characters were at them.

 

[gamerprinter]

THAC0, classes with different XP amounts to level up, never getting a character to 9th level, because they all die at 1st, 3rd, 5th or 7th level - all of them die. Where 7th level is considered high level.

 

[teitan]

Forgotten Realms was massively controversial and in some circles openly derided when it was first presented, and increasingly so as the NPCs that were published were more and more powerful, because in FR characters were roughly twice the level that would have been assigned to them in prior settings and typical play. This probably reached a culmination in publications like FOR6 The Seven Sisters (2e) which I remember being a straw that broke the camel's back for even FR supporters. In any event, FR is mostly "2e feel" and not "1e feel".

Personally, for a lot of reasons, and not just the power creep, I consider FR the worst fantasy setting ever published. It feels like a setting for non-gamers, popularized primarily by the novels of R.A. Salvatore and others, but not prized for its creativity or value as a game setting.

But the Hat of FR has become ubiquitous, and to a large extent most modern D&D in artwork and in settings as presented as a world pretty much indistinguishable from that of something like Thor: Ragnarok. Eberron is vastly better designed than FR, but it has that modern feel with magical hovercraft and trains and a general magic as technology feel.

As for the fact that 1e characters can eventually reach those heights, that isn't really a contradiction of anything I said. In fact, I mentioned that in my post. It's just that if the 1e characters do that, then they become exceptions in the world - Golden Age Heroes in a world that is otherwise largely mundane - needing to go off world to find most challenges - demi-planes, outer planes, the deep under dark and the most legendary dungeons. The ubiquitous high magic wasn't assumed to exist in the setting, but rather to be confined to the "dungeon" "under world".

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I beg to differ on that. The original grey box was not that far out of pace with GH, it wasn’t as gritty in presentation and the original FR supplement series maintained that through line until the 2e relaunch. The high powered stuff and shuffling everything into FR was what drove higher level into the setting and caused the ridiculousness up. The Orcus Bloodstone Pass modules weren’t FR modules until later after they came out and they were shoved into the setting. Even the example low-intermediate characters dealing with a lich IS pretty 1e because game balance until around 3.5 was not defined as it is today and people rage quitting over a party encountering a monster that was “too powerful”. It was seen as an obstacle to be overcome or something to deal with in some way. Running into a valley of 3 hill giants as a group of 3rd level players wasn’t seen as “omg you’re a bad DM” but verisimilitude. In fact the FR modules and supplements went further to having the ecologies of dungeons and encounters make sense. So the setting was not derided except by a minority and quickly overtook the others to become the default and not just to “get one over on Gary”. It was very well done in the first edition era of the OGB before the RSE kept changing everything every four years and novel canon trumped table canon.

 

[Velderan]

The biggest key to a 1E feel is that I have to be going through puberty when I play it.

Which is a pretty tough ask for the OSR publisher trying to make a 1e clone.

 

[Valetudo]

Maybe multiple party wipes at lvl 1?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Gold for XP, player skill, and actual long term/permanent effects on PCs are the big ones for me.